Review Summary

If you’ve seen “No Country for Old Men” or “A Simple Plan” or any number of other, similar movies, you probably know that nothing good is likely to come from taking somebody else’s bag full of cash. Perhaps Ray and Carla, the adulterous couple at the center of “The Square,” haven’t seen these films, or have drawn the wrong lessons from them. After Carla comes across a satchel full of money that her loutish, vaguely criminal husband has stashed in a crawl space in the laundry room of their house, she and Ray concoct a plan to snatch it and get out of town. What else would they do? And what could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit, of course, but Ray and Carla’s misfortunes are, in the perverse, tried-and-true logic of film noir, a boon to the audience, who can reap a clammy kind of satisfaction from a well-turned wallow in someone else’s depravity. “The Square,” which is the first feature directed by Nash Edgerton, an Australian stuntman turned filmmaker, is a nasty, gripping exercise in sin and comeuppance. — A. O. Scott